And historic. Eight years after the German Parliament narrowly voted to relocate the capital, it will hold its first session next week in the rebuilt Reichstag. That’s the same Reichstag that was torched in 1933, giving Hitler an excuse to seize emergency powers and do away with the Weimar Republic. It’s the same Reichstag on which Soviet troops planted their flag in the final European battle of World War II, ending the Third Reich but also splitting the country and the city. Now the building’s reopening will signal the coming of the “Berlin Republic,” which, according to Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s Inauguration speech last November, will be marked by the “self-confidence of a grown-up nation that doesn’t have to feel superior or inferior to anyone, that accepts its history and responsibility–but is forward-looking.”
Fine words: but when Germany looks to the future, what does it see? East Germans, like their neighbors in Poland whose border is only 100 kilometers away from the new capital, hope it means an eastward shift in focus. “As long as the capital was in Bonn, the orientation was completely toward the West,” says east Berlin film director Bernhard Stephan. But the euphoria of Nov. 9, 1989, when Berliners danced on top of the collapsing wall, is long gone. So is the initial joy over reunification a year later, and the expectation that moving the capital to Berlin would radically alter Germany and the Germans. According to a recent Emnid poll published in the weekly Der Spiegel, only 13 percent of Germans expect the move to change the politics of their country. And Berlin itself still remains a deeply divided city.
Nonetheless, Germany is changing. A new generation of politicians has taken power, with no personal memories of World War II. Less paralyzed by their country’s Nazi legacy, they are eager and willing to play a more assertive role in the world. Many commentators heralded the participation of German Tornado fighters in the air war against Yugoslavia as evidence that the “Bonn Republic” has already been consigned to the history books. Young Germans are moving to Berlin assuming it’s where the next chapter will be written. “History is being made here, and I feel a part of it,” says Crispin Prill, a 24-year-old Web designer who moved from Hamburg last year.
History, of course, is Berlin’s problem. Berliners may earnestly want to leave yesterday–and the day before yesterday–behind; in practice, they stumble over the shackles of the past at every turn. Politicians, for example, have been fiercely debating whether the Reichstag can keep its old name; Reich is not a word of the new Germany. And there’s the seemingly endless debate about what kind of Holocaust memorial should be built in Berlin. On taking office, the Schroder government made little secret of its ambivalence about the project, even hinting that it might be best abandoned. When this led to accusations that the new government wasn’t as committed to honoring the victims as Helmut Kohl was, new proposals were rushed into view–and immediately got bogged down in new controversies.
Yet the tension between a dark past and a new “European” future is everywhere. City boosters point to the massive rebuilding program that costs about $18 billion a year. “If you want to see the past, go to Rome,” says Volker Hassemer, the managing director of the city’s marketing agency. “If you want to see the future, come to Berlin.” Nice thought; but visitors still want to know where Hitler’s bunker was located and why it’s so difficult to find the few remaining remnants of the wall. “The bulk of the people coming to Berlin are still more fascinated by its murky history–the Third Reich, the cold war–than by current developments,” says Nick Gay, the British organizer of The Original Berlin Walks, a walking-tour company.
City officials may be equally unrealistic in their commercial expectations. It will not be easy to lure major companies back to Berlin from Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg. Mayor Eberhard Diepgen recently claimed that the city is taking over “more central economic functions for our country and for Europe.” The reality is different. Struggling to meet the costs of unification, the city is now financially stretched to the limit, with $33 billion in debt. Its 15 percent unemployment rate is much higher than anywhere in western Germany, the result of the virtual collapse of local industries and the disappearance of the subsidies that kept both sides of the city afloat during the cold-war era. “It was a kept city for 40 years: everything was paid for, taken care of,” notes Berlin novelist and law professor Bernhard Schlink. “That’s not good for the character of people.”
One plus: stultifying centralization is no threat here. “Decentralization was a very positive aspect of the Bonn Republic,” argues Oxford historian Anthony James Nicholls. “I wouldn’t like to see the kind of growing centralization you have in London or the strong centralization you have in Paris.” The real danger, warns Bonn University political scientist Ludger Kuhnhardt, may be “a drifting away from federal solutions” as Germany’s states go their own ways. “Germany has begun a process that can transform the federation into a confederation,” he says.
Similarly, Germany’s allies rarely fret publicly about the prospect of a domineering Berlin Republic anymore. To be sure, the conspiracy theorists haven’t disappeared altogether. In her recent book “La Tentation Allemagne,” French author Yvonne Bollmann infers that missing postal codes in Germany’s border areas are reserved for the lost territories of Silesia, east Prussia, the Sudetenland and Alsace-Lorraine. But official Paris has other concerns. “People who know Germany worry more about the weakness of the Schroder government than about German arrogance,” says French political scientist Anne-Marie Le Glossanec. Indeed, far from looking like an economic powerhouse, the Berlin Republic is saddled with sluggish growth and seemingly intractable unemployment.
Still, in Berlin, the pessimism of the mid-1990s is easing up. “In the early 1990s, there was only one word in Germany–‘Berlin’,” says film director Max Frberbock, who divides his time between Hamburg and Berlin. “Then the magic was gone for a few years. Now it’s back.” Outsiders agree. “The new Berlin is dynamic, more dynamic than any European city,” says Gary Smith, the executive director of the new American Academy in Berlin, which is already attracting top American scholars and writers. “Berlin will become a very high-powered, fast-moving city.”
In some fields, the city doesn’t need to bounce back. It never lost its standing as a music capital, for example. “Getting a job in Berlin was like dying and going to heaven,” says Matthew Hunter, a viola player who moved from the Canadian National Orchestra to the Berlin Philharmonic three years ago. “This is a musical paradise.” The city’s division during the cold war reinforced that tradition. East and West competed in funding opera houses and orchestras; so the unified Berlin has three opera houses and five other orchestras. For the same reason, the city has a wealth of museums; the New National Gallery brings together a glittering trove of old masters–Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer and others–that had been in collections on both sides of the old divide.
More surprisingly, the city that once boasted Nobel Prize winners like Albert Einstein and Max Planck is beginning to flex its scientific muscles again. The government is making cutbacks in scientific research in western Germany but pouring money into the former East Berlin and other parts of the old east, attracting top scientists to new institutes. “I’m now working at the biggest relativity institute in the world,” says American astrophysicist Edward Seidel of his current job at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics on the outskirts of Berlin, which opened in 1995. “It seemed like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Can Berliners also welcome outsiders? With nearly 500,000 foreigners–Turks, Russians, Poles and others–the city now represents the multiculturalism of the new Germany. “Berlin is the most international city in Germany,” says Barbara John, the city’s commissioner for foreigners’ affairs. “We have to see the opportunities presented by the migrants here. They are a younger population and more entrepreneurial.” But Berliners still tend to focus on crime and other problems associated with immigration, and even successful foreigners feel the resentment. “This could be a European capital, but there are problems with the German mentality,” argues Alexej Schipenko, a Russian writer who has lived in Berlin for seven years. “In London or Paris it’s normal to have many nationalities and cultures. Here, people don’t like foreigners.”
Relations between west and east Berliners could be better, too. The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the former East German communists, routinely garners about one third of the votes in the eastern part of the city, and plays upon resentments of the “Wessis.” “In museums, schools, banks, all the bosses are from the west,” charges Gesine Lotzsch, a PDS member of the city parliament. “There’s a lot of bitterness.” They are upset, too, by the lavish perks–two years of free flights and housing allowances–for bureaucrats who move to Berlin but keep their families in Bonn.
Still, there are signs that the city is slowly growing together. New arrivals from what Berliners continue to call “west Germany” gravitate naturally to Prenzlauer Berg and other trendy sections of east Berlin, which are sprouting funky new art galleries, cafes and restaurants. Native west Berliners are beginning to explore the rebuilt center of the city in the old East Berlin. And some are looking farther afield. “It’s taking longer than expected, but the reorientation toward the east is happening,” says historian Karl Schlogel, who makes the daily one-hour train commute to a new university for German and Polish students in the border town of Frankfurt an der Oder.
And for all the talk about sullen, resentful “Ossis,” many east Berliners are displaying remarkable resourcefulness. Katarina Ginzel, a former director of a small opera company that didn’t survive the transition, learned everything she could about diamonds and gold, and now makes a good living as a pawnbroker. “I’ve had to change my life completely,” she says, without complaining. “We all should reorient ourselves, including the west German politicians.” As Germany struggles to reinvigorate its politics and economy, that’s precisely the kind of spirit the Berlin Republic will really need.